Electronic mail (email) has become an integral part of business and personal communications. As such, many users have multiple email accounts for work and home use. Moreover, with the increased availability of mobile cellular and wireless local area network (LAN) devices that can send and receive emails, many users wirelessly access emails stored in source mailboxes of different email storage servers (e.g., corporate email storage server, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, etc.).
One approach for delivering emails to a user's mobile wireless communications device is to use an email proxy server to retrieve new emails from an email storage server(s) (e,g., an ISP server) associated with the user's email account, and then forward the emails to the user's wireless handheld device. One challenge of doing so is knowing when to check the email storage server for new messages. Typically, this is done periodically because the email proxy server will not otherwise know when a new message arrives. Yet, if the period of polling is too short, this may place a significant burden on the email proxy server, particularly if it has to check multiple email servers for numerous users.
Another approach to forwarding emails to wireless handheld devices is provided by a client application called SMS4Mail. This program checks and filters email accounts and sends Short Message Service (SMS) messages to a user's mobile phone. The program can handle up to twenty POP3 e-mail accounts, and it may also send the SMS messages to multiple mobile phones at the same time. Various criteria may be used for filtering incoming e-mails to be sent to the mobile phone, such as From and Subject fields. Users also have the option to limit the maximum number of SMS messages for one day. Moreover, an SMS message is only to be sent once for each email which meets the specified filtering criteria.
While such systems may be advantageous for notifying users on their mobile phone when new messages are available, SMS messages are limited to a relatively small number of characters, so while a user will receive an indication of a new email, if the email is fairly long the user will only be able to see the very first part of the message. Moreover, many wireless network (i.e., cellular) carriers charge for each SMS message, which may make such an approach undesirably expensive for some users.